


In Pajamas

by GretchenSinister



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 15:58:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18854311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "Inspired because it’s said that Watchers are like guardians.Jack Frost is a new Watcher, suffering from amnesia of a past event where he failed to keep a young Slayer from her doom and giving rise to the new one, a girl called Sophie Bennett currently under the watch of a Watcher known as Aster Bunnymund, who has unfortunately been instructed to leave due to attachment.Nicholas St. North is instructed to take Jack under his wing, having been successful in raising and guiding a Slayer named Katherine many years ago. Bunnymund is bitter about his replacement, which sparks up a rivalry between them while Jack is being trained to take his place. Tooth is a Witch who teaches Sophie at her school and Sandy is an Old One, but an Old One who was converted to the side of good a long time ago by a mysterious being known only as MiM.Unfortunately Burgess was built on a Hellmouth...[cut for length]"Once again, I’d like to dedicate the crossover to Wikipedia.Jack wakes up in North’s house, ready to start over from a past he can’t remember and start training Sophie, but there’s an emergency in progress, and, unrelated, glitter at the breakfast table.





	In Pajamas

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 9/17/2015.

_It was cold, it was so cold, nothing could ever be warm again and he couldn’t breathe and…_  
  
Jack shook himself awake. He didn’t need that again, no matter where he was waking up.  
  
When he opened his eyes, he was momentarily disoriented by how much better than his dream his surroundings were. For as long as he could really remember (not long), he had been in the midst of the Watchers’ bureaucratic shuffle in which they didn’t tell him much of anything and had kept him in more than a few bare-bones rooms. Which were maybe more like cells? And why had the loss of his memories also corresponded with the loss of all his worldly possessions? Based on his dreams, he really didn’t think he had been in a fire.  
  
Ugh, no. Figuring that out was for later, because now he was in North’s house, and he was pretty sure he could trust North. Or, he was pretty sure he wanted to trust North, and that was better than how he had been feeling about the rest of the Watchers, so it was probably just as good. North had given him pajamas, and this room with all its sturdy, well-loved, heavy wooden furniture, including a bed that was actually soft, and blankets that were actually warm. And if he remembered correctly, there would even be a rug for his feet once he got out of bed.  
  
There was, but what there wasn’t was the set of clothes that Jack had arrived in, or any others, for that matter. Okay. It wasn’t as if he had been really attached to the random clothes he had been allowed to scrounge up while the Watchers had figured out what to do with him. If North didn’t want him to come to the amazing-smelling breakfast downstairs in his pajamas, he would have to tell him that personally.  
  
*  
  
North’s house was a large, mostly well-preserved Victorian. The modifications that Jack noticed as he walked down the hallway and descended the stairs were all practical ones, meant to make the house more comfortable for someone so tall and broad.  
  
No doubt there was plenty of Watcher stuff hidden away behind the doors that were closed, and the attic and cellar wouldn’t be standard, to say the least, but at the moment it seemed most like a home, rather than anything else.  
  
Since he couldn’t remember any other, Jack decided he was going to try to keep this one, no matter what happened—and he was going to do his best to keep anything bad from happening, either, just so this first memory could always be good, so that Sophie could look back on her time here as fun rather than grueling, so that—  
  
“And look at him!” A scowling, prematurely-gray man pointed at him across the table as soon as he stepped into the kitchen. “He slept right through it! How is he supposed to be better than me, when the exact second I’m taken away from my duties, Pitch Black swoops in, and—”  
  
“Bunny!” North said sharply from his place at the griddle. “Hold off for two minutes, yes?” He turned to Jack and smiled. “Good morning! We have pancakes, bacon, sausage, eggs, coffee, hot chocolate, hash browns, toast…”  
  
Jack was distracted from the litany of breakfast foods (it didn’t really matter, he was pretty sure he was going to have some of everything) by the sight of the third person in the kitchen, a short, chubby blond man, sitting at the table and calmly sprinkling glitter onto his hash browns like it was salt, then just as calmly eating them. He knew he’d seen stranger things, even if the amnesia made naming them a problem, but now that he was paying attention, the issue wasn’t so much the glitter as the  _feeling_  that came from the man. He was far more than anyone else in the room could comprehend, he was old, older than civilization, he had powers capable of moving the stars, he could play with human minds like toys, he…was putting glitter on his sunny-side-up eggs now.  
  
“Um…” Jack managed. He knew there was something dangerous about this, something that the Watchers had seen fit to include in his crash-course “rehabilitation”, but for the life of him he could not recall it. He was almost grateful to know that something in the present was causing his memory to short-circuit, but still, who was this? Why were they in North’s kitchen?  
  
“Sandy! You are freaking Jack out,” North said.  
  
_Who calls a being like that “Sandy”?_  Jack wondered. Well, it was safer than his real name, no doubt, but still, nothing important had been answered.  
  
“Jack, come get some food. And please don’t mind Sandy, he is on the side of good, for a very long time now! But you have probably not heard of him because he is, let us say, unreliable.”  
  
Sandy shrugged and nodded.  
  
“O-kay.”  
  
As he loaded a plate with food, Bunny spoke again. “Is the two minutes up, now? We may not exactly have a lot of time, and I don’t want to wait to get any more brain-dead orders from the Watchers, because they might just be awful enough to say that this is a situation that should be handled by the slayer, and  _she. Is. Twelve._.  
  
“I can intercept their orders and tell you if that’s what they say,” Sandy said softly.  
  
“Yes, that will be good to do,” North said. “As long as they cannot be sure I read and disregarded, they will be reluctant to do anything against me. Of course, maybe I am assuming too much? Jack, does twelve seem young to you to go fight ancient vampires?”  
  
“Incredibly so!” Jack said as soon as he had finished chewing, hoping that maybe Bunny’s glare would lessen now. “Would someone bring me up to speed, though? I thought I was here to train a slayer, not to help deal with an emergency.”  
  
Bunny growled with frustration and stood up to pace. “That’s because the Watchers don’t know what they’re doing! They order me away because I care about Sophie like she was my own kid, and they send you over, no memory that’s useful, dead from exhaustion, and what do you know! Her house is unprotected for one night, and Pitch Black’s cronies kidnap her older brother, I guess because, I don’t know, they want to start traumatizing Sophie early? She had been kept so secret, and now—argh!” He threw his arms in the air for a moment before folding them tightly and stalking off.  
  
“Is that right?” Jack asked North. “It’s my fault the slayer’s brother got taken?”  
  
“It is Pitch Black’s fault that Jamie was kidnapped,” North said. “And after that it is maybe the Watchers, for not realizing the dangers. But not yours. However, we will be needing your full help to get him back…yes, before they see fit to tell us we should involve a child. They would do that, but no matter her heritage, it is not right. Even if saying she was ready would have kept Bunny from being sent from her side…it takes a certain arrogance in one’s skills as her right-hand man to choose to do that.”  
  
Jack nodded slowly. Yes, there was something about North he had been told, his relationship to a slayer named Katherine. “I want to help,” he said, “but I only have a couple months of memories to draw from. And I’m totally okay with them coming back naturally,” he finished quickly, noticing Sandy looking at him curiously.  
  
“So you are saying you don’t know what happened to you to get you assigned a new charge?” North asked.  
  
“Well…yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Do  _you_  know something?”  
  
“I thought I did,” North said. “Now I am thinking, maybe it is wrong.” He looked into Jack’s eyes and Jack saw that he was lying, that he knew his information was accurate, that he just didn’t want to tell Jack right now. He wasn’t trying to hide that he was lying. He just didn’t want to tell Jack that he was maybe too fragile for this, because he didn’t want Jack to protest that and hurt himself. Jack thought of cold, cold water and thought maybe North really was being kind. “Anyway,” North continued, taking some dishes to the sink, “we have more urgent business. We save Jamie, then I tell you the rumors. All right?”  
  
“All right.” Jack paused. “Does any of this urgent business include getting clothes? I mean, I assume Pitch Black isn’t going to be wearing his pajamas when we confront him, so I’d rather not face him wearing mine, either.”  
  
“Yes, we will get you some clothes,” North said. “But here is first lesson. Never, ever assume anything about Pitch Black. Even small things. I would like you to stick around, all right?”  
  
“All right,” Jack said, wondering if this meant that Pitch Black was the kind of vampire who did fight in his pajamas. It seemed so ridiculous, Jack privately vowed to put glitter on his own breakfast if that turned out to be the case. 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> bowlingforgerbils said: omg YESSSS Sandy as and Old One but nice, and how funny that him speaking in this ficlet is exceeding creepy for some reason? This is a great crossover.


End file.
